The Oregon Jamboree was founded in 1992 for a purpose: to help revitalize a once-prosperous community that had fallen on hard times thanks to government edicts that shut down much of the local timber products industry.
The Jamboree has become pretty unique and special because of its success and the fact that its main purpose for existence continues to be the economic recovery of Sweet Home. After slogging through some tough early years — which included a cash infusion by local residents and businesses one year to keep it alive — the festival finally became profitable.
That is, until this year.
Jamboree figures, which we reported in our Dec. 15 issue, show that the 2010 festival has finished close to $100,000 in the red — despite a line-up that included headliners Keith Urban, Miranda Lambert and Blake Shelton. The question is why?
Jamboree insiders blame the economy and local competition.
There’s not much we can do about the economic dip, but the competition from the Willamette Country Music festival in Brownsville has left a lot of local people with a bad taste in their mouths.
When the WCMF was founded three years ago by Brownsville resident Warren Williamson, it appeared to be a carbon copy of the Jamboree, except it was a for-profit enterprise — a business. Williamson insisted at the time that it wasn’t a copycat venture and that he wasn’t trying to compete with the Jamboree. He told us, here at The New Era, that he thought there was room for two festivals in the local area and that they didn’t need to compete.
WCMF picked up corporate sponsors, one of them Bi-Mart, and moved from its initial location northwest of Brownsville to a grass seed farm off Highway 228, about a quarter mile south of Sunset Lane. Williamson managed the festival through this year’s performance, but a few days after that event his vice president of operations, Anne Hankins, of Eugene, formed a new corporation, Willamette Country Music Concerts.
Bi-Mart, and other major players, including the owner of the venue property, hitched their wagons to the new corporation.
The WCMF clearly has become Bi-Mart’s baby, judging by the amount of advertising the company has committed to the event in the last year and in recent months.
Its float in the Albany Veteran’s Parade on Nov. 11, a jacked-up, oversized 4×4, prominently promoted the festival. In local newspapers WCMF ads are running regularly and sometimes a few pages away from those for the Oregon Jamboree. Bi-Mart bags prominently advertise the WCMF. The company has broadcast commercials with the same message.
There’s anecdotal evidence that patrons are confused. We’ve heard of at least a couple of instances in which people didn’t attend the Oregon Jamboree last summer because they didn’t like the line-up — except that the line-up they were looking at was WCMF’s. If you’re not a major fan of country music festivals or if you’re not familiar with this part of the Willamette Valley, it’s understandable that there might be confusion.
It’s quite likely that WCMF is having an impact on the Jamboree, though the kind of anecdotal evidence just cited is not sufficient to make definitive judgments as to the extent of that impact.
The fact that someone has decided to compete with the Jamboree should come as no surprise. We have a good thing going here in Sweet Home. It has brought millions of dollars into the local economy and that hasn’t gone unnoticed by others. When you’re successful, you can expect competition.
The fact that the competition is 13 miles down the road is a bit uncomfortable, though we have to remember that this wasn’t the community of Brownsville that decided, en masse, to grab a piece of the action. Sure, residents bought into the plan, but if Sweet Home were in a situation in which someone came in with a credible proposal to start an antiques fair or build a medical school here, something that would bring people or money into the community, we would have a hard time resisting that.
The tendency is to think that Bi-Mart is the bad guy here, since the company has clearly taken a leading role in the operation of WCMF. Its ads and commercials for WCMF are far more prevalent than what the Jamboree can afford. WCMF tickets are cheaper than Oregon Jamboree tickets, partly because Bi-Mart offers discounts to its members who buy them.
Don Leber, director of advertising for Bi-Mart and one of the major organizers of WCMF, has pointed out that the company has sponsored other country music events in the past and, in fact, once expressed interest in getting involved with the Oregon Jamboree. That didn’t work out for various reasons, and Leber has said he had been looking for an event located between Portland and the company’s headquarters in Eugene that would reach “a majority of our state’s population and a large amount of Bi-Mart stores.” He says WCMF’s purpose is “to give back to communities” and it intends to help establish a development group in the Brownsville area that, he said, would also benefit Sweet Home.
Bi-Mart is a local, Eugene-based company — not some juggernaut based in the East somewhere. It is employee-owned, so the people behind the counters are not only the ones who get paychecks from the money we spend but, hopefully, are profiting in other ways as well. Money spent at Bi-Mart is not going directly to Arkansas or Ohio or Chicago — before it heads off to China.
We should accept that Bi-Mart is trying to be a good guy here and WCMF has offered it what it sees as a chance to do that.
Still, it’s hard to say that WCMF is doing Sweet Home more good than harm here. The Oregon Jamboree, as noted already, is different than other festivals because it’s put on by a community, not a company. The paid staff is minimal and the volunteer base that has built the Jamboree into what it is today is vast and committed. But it doesn’t have the kind of corporate support that WCMF clearly has.
So having almost a carbon-copy production 13 miles down the road, with that kind of backing, is really making things harder for the Jamboree and puts all the effort and sacrifice that’s gone into making it a success at risk.
The Jamboree has had immeasurable benefits for Sweet Home in recent years. All of the downtown revitalization efforts we’ve seen recently — downtown shopping events such as the Sale-abration, Stepping into Fall and Warm and Cozy Tour, building façade improvements, the new economic development director — are funded primarily by seed money from the festival.
The answer to this challenge is not to have a community tantrum and announce we’re all boycotting Bi-Mart, as some have suggested. This is the real world and, as mentioned already, the obvious success the Jamboree has had is almost guaranteed to breed competition. This is competition.
We simply have to do better. The Jamboree has to make every effort to help the uninformed distinguish our product from the rest.
Festival organizers are already taking steps to improve the Jamboree, adding a second stage in Sankey Park that will allow the public a more up-close-and-personal experience with some of the artists. The cost of last year’s expansion into Sankey Park is one of the reasons why the Jamboree wasn’t profitable this year, but it definitely has improved the offerings and the feel of the festival.
SHEDG needs to keep working with its sponsors to produce as high quality a product as possible. If companies want to do good for a community, it’s hard to think of a more attractive sponsorship than support for a festival whose sole aim is to help a beleagured community climb out of a hole.
Rather than boycott Bi-Mart, we need to communicate our concerns positively. Write a polite letter to the Bi-Mart Board of Directors or talk to the manager (not the sales clerks) of your local Bi-Mart. You can find the contact information on-line at http://www.bimart.com/contact.aspx.
SHEDG needs to keep the lines of positive communication warm as well. Just because things haven’t worked out thus far doesn’t mean Bi-Mart could never be part of what is really a good cause.
Sweet Home residents and Jamboree-goers need to communicate — to educate friends, relatives, business associates about the problem we’re facing and ask them to help educate the public about the fact that there are TWO competing festivals here and there are differences.
Sweet Home is blessed with rare and commendable community spirit and toughness. It shows in the ways residents have banded together to build things like the community center and to help one another in tough times. It shows in the Jamboree’s growth into one of the largest, finest festivals in the Northwest — even the nation.
As a community we can step up to meet this challenge in a positive way. We must.